Are you done writing, ready to show your words to the world? Ulysses lets you export easily to a host of standard formats, share your texts via Messages or Mail, even publish directly to a WordPress blog or a Medium account. Here’s an overview.

Quick Export on Mac

When working with Ulysses for Mac, these are the ways to get to Quick Export.

Use the Quick Export button top right in the editor to export the current sheet.

In the library or the sheet list, right-click on a sheet, a group, or even a filter, and select “Quick Export...” from the context menu.

Also, you can simply hit the shortcut ⌘6 (command-6).

You can also export multiple sheets at once: just hold ⇧ (shift) while selecting them in the sheet list.

The Quick Export panel looks like this:

Top left you can switch to the desired format of your output. This can be Text, HTML, ePub, PDF, DOCX, or, if you want to upload your text to a WordPress blog or your Medium account, Publishing.

In the center of the panel you can specify the export settings, depending on the previously selected format. You can, for example, choose an export style and a page size when your output is going to be a PDF document.

The icons top right represent the available export actions:

Preview… to see what your exported document is going to look like

Copy to Clipboard

Save to…, to open Finder and save to a location of your choice

Open in…, lists all available applications for further processing of your output

Send… your output as mail or iMessage, share via Airdrop, print

Publish… to publish to a Medium account or a WordPress blog

You can, for example, send a Word document as mail attachment, or open an ePub file instantly in iBooks.

The large button at the bottom executes a default export action (you can also simply press Return). You should set this button to the action you use most (for example “Copy to Clipboard…” in HTML export). Right click on any of the available icons to set the respective action as default, or switch actions with the tab key ⇥.

Have you seen the tiny page icon on the default button? Use it to drag and drop your file to a Finder window, on your desktop, into an email, etc.

Quick Export on iPad and iPhone

Here are three ways to invoke Quick Export when working on iPad or iPhone:

To export your current sheet, use the Quick Export button top right in the editor.

In the library or the sheet list, swipe left on a group or a sheet, tap … and select “Quick Export...” from the list of available actions.

To manually select the sheets to export, go to the sheet list, tap Select top right, mark the sheets in question and select Export at the bottom.

Any of these actions will directly bring up a preview of your output. Tap the specified format at the top to switch to another exporter (Text, HTML, ePub, PDF, DOCX, Publishing) and specify its respective settings. Tap Done to return to the preview.

By tapping the … icon top right you can now select between the available export actions. By and large, these are the same as on Mac, depending on the selected format and the apps installed on your iOS device: You can send your works to friends or coworkers, open them in other apps, copy them to your clipboard or upload them to iCloud Drive or another sync service.

Export Settings

Let’s quickly glance at the export settings available for each format.

While the PDF and DOCX exporters produce either a PDF file or a Word document, they share the same settings. On the one hand, you can choose a style for defining the details of your document’s layout. Ulysses comes with a couple of built-in styles for that purpose. For a wider choice, browse Ulysses’ Style Exchange. On the other hand, you can define the page size of your document.

When exporting to ePub, you can set an author name, a title and select a cover image for your ebook. Also, you can select a formatting style, albeit the ePub format, in comparison to PDF and DOCX, technically leaves fewer options for an individual layout.

HTML export will interpret Markdown tags as HTML code. Select between Snippet to quickly copy-paste to an existing website, and “Full Page” to create a complete HTML document, including header, body, CSS links and so on.

With Text export, you can select between Plain Text, Rich Text, Markdown and TextBundle. Plain Text will strip out all of your markup tags, while Rich Text will convert them and produce an RTF file with WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) formatting. Markdown and TextBundle will both include Markdown formatting during export, but TextBundle can also take your images along.

When selecting Publishing, you will be able to switch between your WordPress and Medium accounts – given you connected them first to Ulysses, of course. You can connect as many accounts as you want. Once this is done, it will take you just a few clicks/taps to upload your articles, complete with images. For more details, read our articles about publishing to WordPress and Medium.